Le Pont de Villeneuve-la-Garenne

Sisley painted this in the summer of 1872, barely a year after the Franco-Prussian War and the bloody collapse of the Paris Commune had torn through the city and its outskirts. There is none of that here. He stands at the water's edge at Villeneuve-la-Garenne, a village just downriver from Paris, and paints a sunny afternoon, a cast-iron suspension bridge from the 1840s, a boat pulled up on the bank, a couple of holidaymakers by the river. The new bridge, plain and modern, is as much the subject as the water. He laid the light on the Seine in short, bright strokes, two years before a critic coined the word Impressionism as an insult.